SCEE's Phil Harrison PSP talk

[Snyder]

Say again?

They don't test Atrac3+, only the like three years old (maybe more) Atrac3 cocec.

Well, but you claimed that even the old Atrac3 is superior to MP3, which simply isn't true.

Anyway, you think most MP3s out there are compressed using the latest version of Lame using highest quality switches?

My MP3s usually are. Sure, if you don't mind the crappy quality that's usually spread through Kazaa&Co...but I do mind (at least since I got decent headphones). Nothing more horrible than a 128kbit MP3 encoded with a 5 year old Xing encoder.

 

[Teasy]

2,5 hours average game time sure sounds little, and might have impact on sales. But I'm still confident most games will be more (4-5 hours).

Your really confident that most games will have 4-5 hours battery life? If so I have two questions:

1: Why would Sony say 2-3 hours for gaming if most games will be 4-5 hours (Sony being very conservative???).

2: What battery life do you expect from DS?

 

[Guden Oden]

Well, but you claimed that even the old Atrac3 is superior to MP3

Um, no. I did not.

Nothing more horrible than a 128kbit MP3 encoded with a 5 year old Xing encoder.

Yet, that is the most common MP3s you'll find out there. That, or something quite similar, encoded by Clueless Idiots, not totally uncommonly ripped from a CDROM lacking jitter-protection as well.

 

[Phil]

?

Well, but you claimed that even the old Atrac3 is superior to MP3, which simply isn't true.

Huh? The old ATRAC3s were never decoded with 128Kbps comparable bitrates anyway, but with ~282kbps if I am not mistaken. Only later did Sony include lower bitrates with their LP2 and LP4 'modes'. If I am not mistaken, LP2 is around 140kbps while LP4 is around 68kbps.

I am not quite sure what that site tested and how reliable the results are.

 

[Teasy]

Um, no. I did not.

Sorry to but in but yeah you did. You said that the several year old ATRAC3 is superior to MP3 in the quality vs bitrate comparison...

 

[archie4oz]

Jesus H. C^H^H^H^H people!

Well, but you claimed that even the old Atrac3 is superior to MP3, which simply isn't true.

Neither is really true since you're arguing encoders vs. codecs, gawd knows what online comparison's use to encode their stuff and for playback of ATRAC content. Most old omgjukebox versions wrote out .at3 files, but the current SonicStage writes out .oma files (which are .atx streams in an OpenMG wrapper), and Real only supports a subset of the codec wrapped in an .rm container. And it's never disclosed how the ATRAC3 samples are acquired, what encoder version (or who's, some say Sharp's encoder is better than Sony's)... Besides the encoder I have does a better job than the consumer encoder (and faster to boot)...

Huh? The old ATRAC3s were never decoded with 128Kbps comparable bitrates anyway, but with ~282kbps if I am not mistaken. Only later did Sony include lower bitrates with their LP2 and LP4 'modes'. If I am not mistaken, LP2 is around 140kbps while LP4 is around 68kbps.

No ATRAC based codec that has supported 128Kbps... ATRAC (1.0-4.5 (and don't confuse ATRAC3 with ATRAC 3.0)) was fixed at 292kbps. ATRAC3 runs at 132, 105, 66kbps. ATRAC3plus runs at 256, 64, and 48kbps.

I love when stuff like Lame beats the big guys

It's not too hard to tweak a codec to put out better sound in various test cases. Ogg Vorbis has several branches that are tweaked for high-bitrate and low-bitrate that can blow a lot of commercial production encoders out of the water (and lame as well), hell MPC has long done well but never gone anywhere...

Keep in mind, ATRAC in general has been designed to do integer transform encodes on pretty anemic hardware (remember, portable hardware encoders), wheras Lame has had the benefit of being able to deliver high precision floating-point transform encodes on a desktop system (most portable hardware that *can* encode mp3 can't come close to Lame)... Plus also emphasis on very lightweight decode requirements (this is something that's a bit of a problem for instance with WMA and Ogg Vorbis (even using Tremor), while mp3 and AAC implementations are typically lighter, and ATRAC is absurdly easy to decode)...

Anyways enough to the perceptual audio crap...

 

[Phil]

No ATRAC based codec that has supported 128Kbps... ATRAC (1.0-4.5 (and don't confuse ATRAC3 with ATRAC 3.0)) was fixed at 292kbps. ATRAC3 runs at 132, 105, 66kbps. ATRAC3plus runs at 256, 64, and 48kbps.

Thanks for the correction. I wasn't sure about the exact numbers anymore (admittedly, I stopped using MDs for quite some time now and haven't kept track with it anymore).

 

[rabidrabbit]

2,5 hours average game time sure sounds little, and might have impact on sales. But I'm still confident most games will be more (4-5 hours).

Your really confident that most games will have 4-5 hours battery life? If so I have two questions:

1: Why would Sony say 2-3 hours for gaming if most games will be 4-5 hours (Sony being very conservative???).

2: What battery life do you expect from DS?

A1: I'm confident on 4-5h, just as those who claim it'll be 2-3 hours are confident it won't be more, preferably even less.
Why am I not allowed to be confident on the positive side, if the naysayers are confident on the minus side, after all we base our confidence on the same vague information.

A2: Assuming they use the same batteries as in GBA-SP, a little less (maybe 1-1,5h) than GBA-SP, because of the 2 screens and more powerful processors.
Assuming they use bigger battery, the same as GBA-SP.
I've never used a GBA for longer periods, so I have no first hand experience of it's real world battery consumption.

 

[Teasy]

rabidrabbit

I said nothing about you not being allowed to think that did I? Personally I just don't think the info we do have inspires much confidence in most PSP games having 4-5 hours battery life. I'd be extremely suprised.

 

[Guden Oden]

Sorry to but in but yeah you did.

Uh, yeah, after going back to the first page to check it seems I did. My mistake, I had the erroneous memory I was talking about ATRAC3+... It's not easy to keep track of everything in multi-page threads, hehe! Sorry about the confusion.